Right Thinking from the Left Coast

Addendum: They Are Also Coming For Your Kids

As Alex can tell you, the current rulers of Connecticut might be some of the worst in the country. It’s not just their policies; it is their disgusting determination to leverage the horror of the Sandy Hook massacre into advancing any liberal agenda item they can even remotely connect to it:

Home-schoolers represent the only authentically radical social movement in the United States (Occupy Wall Street was a fashion statement) and so they must be suppressed, as a malevolent committee of leftist academics and union bosses under the direction of Governor Dannel Malloy is preparing to do in Connecticut, using the Sandy Hook massacre as a pretext. The ghouls invariably rush to the podium after every school massacre, issuing their insipid press releases before the bodies have even cooled, and normally they’re after your guns. But the Malloy gang is after your children.

Malloy’s committee on the Newtown shootings is recommending that Connecticut require home-schooling families to present their children to the local authorities periodically for inspection, to see to it that their psychological and social growth is proceeding in the desired direction. For anybody even passingly familiar with contemporary government schools, which are themselves a peerless source of social and emotional dysfunction, this development is bitterly ironic.

Big Education hates home-schooling for obvious reasons. A lot of mainstream liberals dislike it intensely. Partly this is their love of order and uniformity; home-schooling is a perfect example of the much-dreaded spontaneous order. But it’s also because of their perception — an incorrect one — that home-schooled kids are being taught crazy creationism or not taught at all. In fact, home-schooled children massively outperform their public school counterparts by any standard. And home-schooling parents have organized sports, social groups and events so that home-schooled kids have an active social life.

I don’t agree with everything Williamson says in that article. My local public schools are quite good and low on indoctrination. But I will cheer his rousing defense of home-schooling. I’ve worked with a few kids who were home-schooled. It’s true that some were a bit sheltered and awkward and had trouble cutting the apron strings. But that’s also true of some public-schooled kids (like, um, me). It’s also true that the home-schooled kids were well-prepared, hard-working and quickly adapted to university life once they were on their own. One I worked with, who was raised in a religious home-schooling environment, went on to earn four degrees (including one in astrophysics) and is a faculty member at a prestigious university.

There is no evidence, none, that home-schoolers are more likely to have mental problems or become violent. The Sandy Hook shooter was briefly home-schooled but spent most of his time in the public schools. To connect him to the millions of kids thriving in home-schooling is disgraceful and offensive.